“Yeah, they’re gone”: Musk confirms cuts to X’s election integrity team — “‘Election Integrity’ Team.. was undermining election integrity,” Musk writes
arstechnica.com
“Yeah, they’re gone”: Musk confirms cuts to X’s election integrity team — “‘Election Integrity’ Team.. was undermining election integrity,” Musk writes::"'Election Integrity' Team... was undermining election integrity," Musk writes.
I have a hunch that in the terrifyingly near future, we're going to see the internet absolutely dominated by enshitification.
Don't get me wrong, it's bad now ...because like the frogs in hot water, we collectively just tolerate changes for the worse. But it used to be small incremental changes over a long period.
Then this Musk asshole comes along, looks at the frogs ever so slowly cooking.... and cranks the stove to max, pisses in the frog-pot, supplements the heating element with a welding torch, and flips the frogs off as he pours gasoline all over the kitchen.
And the frogs JUST FUCKING TAKE IT.
What message does that send to the rest of the internet?
Here's a bit of good news. The idea that frogs just wait to get boiled is proven false. Every animal has a limit to what they will tolerate due to self preservation. The from will jump out when it gets too hot.
That being said, I just recently watched Idiocracy... I'm a bit worried.
You should be worried, in the movie they recognized their stupidity and made way for the smarter character to lead.
our timeline is worse than idiocracy
It is not a real phenomenon, though a useful tale for expressing a concept.
Just remember that, regardless of the creators' intents, Idiocracy is essentially pro-eugenics.
That's not true at all, genetics only play a part in the mental development of a person, much of it is instead related to the environment where a person has been growing.
It is as with talent, some people are better than other at certain activities but even the most gifted person cannot compete with a professional who has spent his life training and studying his craft.
The same can be said for "intelligence": if you are never taught to think you'll never think once in your lifetime, even if you are the exact copy of Leonardo da Vinci; on the other hand, even if you are thick as a rock but you've been growing in a society focused on your development you'll be able to become a normal person.
Eugenetic politics do nothing for humanity betterment, social structure is much more important IMHO
Eugenics IMO is just another way to blame poor people for the bad luck of their birth. If we truly wanted to "perfect humanity" there are a million better ways, like free education.
Just piggy backing off of what you're saying
Absolutely. Poverty comes never alone, it usually brings other friends to the party. Like poor education, lack of security, stress, poor nurishment and poor social environment. All this together can easily bring out the worst of people, while the contrary can improve their conditions.
If you are focused on surviving you'll never be able to grow as we are all supposed to
This is so true. Even "breaking out of" poverty is hard, if you're lucky enough to have managed it, because you can't ever change where you've come from. Just anecdotally, my siblings and I have done very well for ourselves financially, but we've had to take on a lot of other family members' debt just to keep them from going under.
So not only do poor people lack the safety net of family wealth, but they experience a kind of opposite effect if they even do manage to "make it."
Okay, I agree with you and I'm not sure why you're saying I'm wrong. That movie definitely has a eugenics bent and that's why I'm saying people shouldn't put too much stock in it.
Because the movie does not hint at eugenetics as solution to the crisis, it's a hymn against stupidity and a cry to better educate the masses. First of all about sexual education and the danger of unprotected sex and secondly about politics and civic duties. I mean, I really don't see how one could interpret the message of the movie as "do eugenetics", that's all.
I think the people seeing it as pro-eugenics are latching onto the “stupid person makes stupid babies” part as being the reason for the Idiocracy. Basically they think the movie is arguing “IQ is 100% nature and 0% nurture”
But IMO the intro pretty clearly showed that the main factor in the degradation of society is that the low IQ family were raising too many kids in a chaotic environment with no actual parenting.
Yeah it's in the opening thesis of the movie:
Not saying I agree with the premise at all, and I'm putting it much more lightly than the movie does.
Idiocracy is satire.
Do you think Fight Club was celebrating super cool guy Tyler Durden too?
It certainly was intended to be satire. Seems that they kind of failed at that over time. We need a new word for when someone makes super cool and blow cereal.
Blow cereal?
Attack of voice dictation and lack of proofreading. Super Colon Blow, It was an old Saturday night live skit
You should have seen me trying to convince it not to write super: blow
Makes sense.
I thought it was slang that I was too old to understand.
If that's the outcome of abstaining from eugenics, I'm willing to give it another shot.
I've been reading more books.
Most everyone I know doesn't have a Twitter or Instagram. Obv I deleted my reddit. What are people supposed to do except just not use the platform? Most authors I want to follow are on substack or mastodon.
I think that as the platforms further enshittify, people will realize there are no intelligent conversations happening on platforms like X, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Ragebait content can only captivate audiences for so long before they either abandon it or are brainwashed by it. If everyone on X is a musk dickrider right wing lunatic then it makes it easier for sane people to stay off of it. Honestly it might be better to give them their safespace echo chamber as long as Democrats, liberals and libertarians mobilize and make their arguments where it matters.
There never was intelligent conversation. People mostly used Twitter to talk about the news. Twitter has gotten worse, but it's always been full of L takes.
You know… it would be funny but also sad and believable if he’s doing all of this just to spite the internet because we wouldn’t let that one emo leather longcoat pic die.
Edit: the pic
It's like Trump running for president because Obama and Seth Meyers roasted him in front of the world... So much awful shit in our world is a direct result of rich, whiney narcissists making things worse for everyone as collateral damage in whatever petty feud they've mostly invented in their heads.
But for real, I am actually fully convinced that that was the inception point in Trump’s head for the idea of going for the presidency.
well now you have to share this picture and keep it going
Let's hope the FCC and whatever other agencies applicable, get teeth and clamp down hard on how these social media giants. the way they operate its damn near treasonous at this point how open they are with allowing other governments to influence their policies. Especially with advertising and to children.
It has been predicted for years that the Internet would split and I'm all for it at this point.
That's an interesting take. I'm kind of curious what you mean by the split. It seems like it's already split a few times, and I sort of see Lemmy as another split. I think the biggest craziness that will get thrown into the mix is serious amounts of AI content, which I know people are tired of hearing about now, but it's a huge deal. I think people are underestimating its power.
Your point still stands, but as far as I can tell in my city, no one really cared about or used Twitter. Even more so after Elongated Muskrat took over. Twitter was always an echo chamber for the most part when it came to mainstream stuff. Sure, there are a few niche cases, but with those cases there was usually already an alternative. Twitter was never as popular to normal people as it is to influencers, celebs, and for some weird reason government personnel or groups. That’s just my experience with the platform at least. I do not know a single person who even used Twitter once in my entire life.
Don't panic until it smells like butter and garlic?
Sounds about right
Aside from conservatives, what fascist dipshits still use Twitter? It's just a cesspool of disinformation and bigotry, so I just assume anyone who uses it is a lying bigot.
Most businesses and institutions still use twitter as their primary communication and support channels. My "wokest" friend still uses it every day, while constantly bitching about Elon. Convenience and habit are a hell of a drug...
I walked past an ambulance the other day and noticed that my city's ambulances have the little bird logo along with the local EMS twitter handle (I live somewhere with publicly funded healthcare). I found myself wondering, "are they going to switch their fleet to use the X logo?" It's funny how much we allowed this private company's little bird logo to worm its way into every aspect of our world. People took for granted that it would always exist and always be something people had a positive association with.
The only good thing about it being renamed to X is that at least we can now keep a bit respect for this 'loved' little bird and link it to "remember when it was called Twitter and still functional?" 😅
"Public Squares" should never be privately owned.
I've heard about this bizarre behavior. I have decided to not cut slack to users.
It is inappropriate to conduct business with bigots and fascists. It is perfectly reasonable for me to label those who use fascist-owned platforms as fascists.
I think it still requires some cross-over time to make that distinction. It's probably a 'big decision' to change social media for businesses and will undoubtedly take time,... And for individuals the Fediverse (however improved it's gotten already) still is a higher tech-difficulty than twitter. Plus the choice between servers (even though a feature) also discourages many too as they don't know what to choose or hold off until the right instance comes along. I myself had been planning to transfer to the Fediverse for a few years already, but it eventually took Facebook banning me for a hack on my account, with no supportline or real working contact what-so-ever to eventually get me to do the effort. Lost 14 years of journaling my life there in 4 minutes time... 😕
Life is analog, not digital.
And the "owned by a fascist" dial is all the way to 10.
Hey, this is fun!
That much extremest hate will burn you up.
Welcome to Lemmy, where all the deep-frieds live.
My wife used it because she has s community of friends she has made there and knows in real life. The same way we both still use Facebook.
Is this the reason people still go to church? What will it take for people to migrate? I personally wouldn't use a bridge that rots my brain to save 10 min on my commute. I wouldnt regularly going to and supporting a toxic infastructure to see freinds, id be inviting them to better locals. Not judging you, just wondering why be a frog in a boiling pot of water... then again you are here so maybe I just need my bubble or something to feel safe idk...
I totally get what you're saying and for what it's worth I don't feel judged by your statements. For platforms where I didn't have that sort of personal connection with "real life" people I am more willing to swap. Here I am on Lemmy, after all lol.
There's just no way I can convince the friends I have on Facebook that I still keep up with there to jump ship with me to join a different platform. Sure, I might convince some, and I might even be the seed of doubt that convinces another person to leave months or years later but by then I'd be gone and they couldn't find me if they even remembered me. Because once you're gone you're just gone. There are a handful of people I know that I think deleted their accounts or otherwise just don't have a presence on social media at all. I have no way to contact them. If they don't want to be contacted that's fine, I'm not saying people have some obligation to be found lol. But the idea of old friends reaching out to me is an appealing feeling and also being able to watch them from a distance and be seen from a distance is an appealing one. Facebook has a level of critical mass (at least in my friend group and I guess age group) that other social media platforms don't have. I think for folks a little younger than me Instagram has that.
And what if I stay? I know I'm getting data mined. Do I like it? No. But I'm not really getting mined so hard that it's really a bad thing. Leaving would be more of an idealogical thing to do than a practical one. Short of some massive boycott it wouldn't change anything.
In short, the negatives of my specific usage of Facebook is extremely minor and the benefits are too much for me to give up.
Ehhh, church is more practical cuz it tends to provide sunday daycare for a couple hours
Twitter, Reddit, World of Warcraft, etc., etc.
If people could just put in the minimal amount of effort to affect positive change, the World would be such a different place.
Unfortunately, there are still functions that Twitter serves that nothing else does. For breaking news, it's still unmatched. For celebrities, influencers, politicians, journalists, etc there's no other platform that has the same microblogging function with the user numbers and clout that Twitter does.
Until that changes, its still useful. It gets less and less useful, but as long as the site is up, allows users to post up to the minute updates and allows users to follow posters, there's only so far it can fall without real competition.
Which you really don't actually need. Nobody needs to know whatever bullshit is happening across the planet in .5 nanoseconds.
Seriously though,what has really changed? It's always been a cesspool
Iirc Amber Alerts ( not the ones notifying Amber Heard's coming to town ) are issued over Twitter. There were cases of people not being able to check, because now a login is required?
I never used Twitter. Here in Germany it has never gotten so far, that it would be the only place you would get some of the important government announcements that can save lives.
Edit: no hate for Amber Heard from my side. I liked to play this stupid joke in my head, long before The Shitshow happened.
Funny that the worse the Republicans are doing the more some people want to take the filters off of social media.
Right Wingers have always gotten preferential treatment and soft touch moderation on social media, because..
Their user base is fucking morons who click every ad, and buy tons of stupid shit (specially if it has their team name on it) bringing in disproportionate income
They know the bulk of their moderation problems are from Right wingers, and don't want to look biased and drive them away by holding them to the same standard they hold everyone else, So they just let the right wingers get away with shit that would get cracked down and account bans handed out for anyone else.
Their own algorithms have been proven to amplify right wing tweets, thus making it easier to find hate messages than it is to find anything else, because they are in bed with the right.
The commercial platforms had a dilemma: (1) They had existing policies against hate propaganda, incitement of violence, and harassment. (2) They wanted to seem at least mostly neutral on matters of partisan politics. And then (3) happened: one of the major parties started doing a lot of hate propaganda, incitement of violence, and harassment.
If Facebook, Twitter, etc. had been following their own stated policies, they would have taken down Trump much earlier. However, those policies were never obligations enforceable against the platform, and would have required those platform companies to explicitly state that they were taking down one of the major parties for not following the platform's rules on hate, violence, and harassment.
Eventually, advertisers communicated with their dollars, that they were not seeing a benefit to their brands from having their ads appear beside the increasingly deranged, criminal, and traitorous Trump.
Maybe that was the plan all along.
Turn Twitter into a turd soup
Educated people who don't click ads stop using Twitter
Save unproductive bandwidth
By quitting twitter I've gone along with Musk's plan. Damn it.
Musk isnt that smart.
Besides, a lot of those big advertisers don't mind advertising to racists/fashies/terrorists, as long as they have the plausible deniability of "Oh, we advertise on twitter, it has a vibrant user base, lets not let the unsavory types ruin it for everyone".
A deniability that goes away now that its been bought by a fashy white supremacist who is actively purging the site of anyone critical to fashy white supremacism.
No one but scummy companies like MyPillow and some asshole selling "gold" trump coins (totally legal tender!*) want to advertise to the creme of that crop.
⁽*ᶜᵒᶦⁿˢ ʰᵃᵛᵉ ⁿᵒ ˡᵉᵍᵃˡ ᵗᵉⁿᵈᵉʳ ᵃⁿᵈ ᵃʳᵉ ᶦⁿᵗᵉⁿᵈᵉᵈ ᶠᵒʳ ᶜᵒˡˡᵉᶜᵗᶦᵒⁿ ᵒⁿˡʸ⁾
I'm gratified that you thought my dumb idea was smart...
2024 is going to be a bad, bad year.
As will be every year after that. It's all downhill from here folks.
Pessimism literally helps nobody, it just makes people more depressed and less likely to do anything about a bad situation. Don't forget that last election had one of the highest young voter turnouts ever recorded, and was by far a huge swing to liberal. Since then the Republican party hasn't even been close to as organised as they were during 2016 and 2020.
Change can and will happen. It already is, albeit slowly and with bumps along the road, just like any progression in society.
Yep. Seriously, keep the faith. And fight the good fight.
You got through to me and changed my perspective. Ty
Pessimism is so addictive. I've struggled with it a ton throughout my life.
Like most bad habits, it's the easier option
I'm glad you have some optimism left in you. I don't.
Trump or that clown Sunak winning your election will have catastrophic effects for my country who's been in full scale war for almost 2 years. All the while the "allies" drag this war out by giving bullshit reasons to not send long range missiles and aircraft (uwu 5-8 months basic proficiency for fighter pilots proficient on a different platform , also known as "if they started even last year, f16s would be flying at least SEAD by now and not relying on a jank adaptor to launch HARM"), and decide that sending 31 Abrams tanks is good enough for a 1200km long frontline.
I had some optimism in March 2022, despite how bad everything looked at the time, it slowly diminished to what it is now by Spring of 2023 when it became clear that goal #1 for our "allies" is NOT to end this war, as quickly as possible, but to bleed russia out, death by a thousand cuts, all with our lives.
rant (cont.)
I can even understand unwillingness to give ATACMS, you don't have a lot of them and need them all to fight Mexican drug cartels or whatever you would use ballistic missiles for in 2023.
You don't even use f16 anymore, and just sold some to Vietnam recently.
There's at least few hundreds Abrams tanks sitting in the desert in dry storage. But no, 31 is all we get.
And the total clownery of political debate where at least two candidates build their platform on being friends with russia and china and stopping all support to Ukraine.
And the total clownery of passing a lend lease act in 2022 and then not using it - trusting Ukraine to win so as to not burden us with returning leased hardware, but not trusting enough to give enough to win.
but there well be a brief period where we can swim in late autumn and early spring. so won't that be nice.
No, I'm banking on the younger generations coming out of the woodwork. They've dealt with so much and really hoping they realize their vote could really send these dinosaurs into extinction.
Taylor Swift seems to be doing a good job with that.
Didn't she get like 150k people to register in a day with an Instagram story or something
The fact that Republicans are already going after her about it shows how scared they are of the impact Gen Z is going to have in 2024
Register where? What's the story?
Register to vote. Americans have to register or they cannot vote.
Ah ok. Didn't know she did that. Kudos to her.
I agree, I have some hope as common folk get more and more tuned in, especially as obscure runs like the Wisconsin Supreme Court judgeship and votes against the Ohio constitutional amendment process change result in overwhelming positive outcomes.
When you’ve lived a life of privilege, equality seems like oppression.
Goverments should have their own fediverse instances and delete all their twitter accounts 🤷
I think they will and the history books will say "In retrospect, having politicians use a privately owned platform to speak to their constituents was a bad call, as Traitor and Child Murderer Elon Musk demonstrated."
If 4chan made Trump win in 2016, Twitter might make Trump win in 2024. Which is a scary thought. Just imagine the level of control one rich man can have over the information highway, Twitter, one of the biggest social media sites in the world, used still by many politicians, journalists and reporters on both sides. It's happening.
Twitter made Trump win in 2016. Like, did people seriously forget about „Trump tweeted“ headlines that dominated daily news for years? The same news that would then claim a small obscure website like 4Chan made Trump president single-handedly. I mean I almost can‘t blame you for memory holing those years, but claiming Twitter wasn‘t absolute dog water before Musk is simply wrong.
In a documentary made during the 2016 election cycle Trump talks about how much better his PR team is because he doesn't have to use traditional channels to reach his base, he can just tweet it when ever he wants to tell the world something.
He was very much using twitter as a primary communication channel from the begining, and this time around, he has both twitter and truth social as his basically his own.
Mueller has me convinced Russian social media farms made Trump win.
James Fucking Comey certainly didn't help.
Rupert Murdoch 2: Information Highway to Hell.
This American Life had a good segment about a content moderator at Twitter
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/797/what-i-was-thinking-as-we-were-sinking/act-two-7
Like the main content moderator who quit.
Note it's 30+minutes and takes a little while to get to Twitter, but it includes reported interactions with Musk.
It talks about the election group of moderators.
This week's On with Kara Swisher has back to back interviews with Yoel Roth (the guy in the TAL ep) and the new CEO of Twitter, Linda Yaccarino and it's worth a listen.
The juxtaposition of the two interviews is something. Roth comes across as a smart, serious person trying to (and admittedly sometimes failing) be a good steward of the internet and tackles the challenges using facts and data. Yaccarino follows up by literally being the definition of a stooge. Very clearly not attached to reality, doesn't know things that Musk has tweeted in spite of saying at the top of the interview they're 100% attached and in the loop with everything Elon's doing. Absolute clown show.
So yeah, expect literally everyone to have a hand in the cookie jar come the '24 election. There isn't enough competence in the company to fill a thimble at this point, and leadership at the company probably is either entirely ignorant of the problem(Yacco), or actively engaging in sabotage in tandem (Musk.)
Fucking hate this man.
I'm going to be so happy when Musk gets brought up on election charges.
That might never happen if Twitter becomes as obscure as myspace or tumblr.
Wait, so the team in charge of misinformation got misinformed about getting fired instead of expanded?
Guy sure loves his irony...
The people in charge of sacking the people responsible for the credits have been sacked.
A moose once bit my sister.
My hovercraft is full of eels.
Guess they should have fact checked it.
He fired the current people to hire new people to the team for what I’ve heard. It’s not a removal but a replacement.
People who will help him spread election misinformation for Trump's next attempt at a coup.
Just proves yet again why an instance with authority to judge against a company should never be paid by that company... 😅
looks at governments 😅
Says a lot about “regulators” 👀
When will the Tesla board of directors move against Musk as CEO to save the company?
I just bought a new electric car. Didn't even consider Tesla because of this guy.
Same when I bought mine last year. I'm very irked by the fact that most manufacturers are changing to their charging plug too. I want nothing to do with anything Tesla/Musk.
While it's a Tesla plug, at least a standard is reached, which will.speed charging stations deployments.
A standard was reached, and everyone except Tesla was on board, and now everyone is for some reason getting on board with yet another standard.
They can't because the company is propped up entirely by his cult of personality. If he goes, Tesla and SpaceX will collapse
Tesla at this point is fine standing on its own. The management at Tesla for years has run interference between musk and the actual engineers. Musk did a lot of necessary fund raising early.on but at this point he is a mass.liability and sales are falling. Tesla has more competition than ever, and he is driving away people who.would buy tesla cars. The right doesn't buy electric vehicles.
I think SpaceX will be fine, Tesla I think you're mostly right. Tesla's valuation has been almost entirely his cult, but the shine is pretty much off that apple. There has already been some vocal outcry over his antics, and if he had a real board instead of his brother and sycophants, he'd probably already be gone. Any responsible board at this point would see that Tesla is having massive internal struggles (they ship about 60/40 cars to vaporware and have increasing issues with QA and service) and the thing it mostly had going for it was first mover advantage which they've now mostly squandered. They still have a good business with the supercharger network, and with proper leadership could still be a big player in the space, but they're about to be inundated with competition they've never really had. They've sort of already lost the cool kid premium status to Rivian and Lucid, and Model 3 is about to face competition in a way it never really has.
So all that, and the CEO is shitposting conspiracy theories on his pet project social media app that he's publicly mismanaging by basically all measures. Like I said, any real board, he'd already be out. I suspect that unless something changes, it won't be long before there will be real moves to remove him.
I don't know where you got the idea that SpaceX is propped up by musks personality, SpaceX is propped up by currently being the most revolutionary space company in the world.
Musk is a dickhead but the spaceX engineers are doing incredible things and advancing humanities space access forward. What SpaceX has done for the global space access can't be understated.
Tbf they're a social media company. If they shut down completely the world wouldn't really skip a beat.
Elon Musk is a fucking Neo Nazi aka "The Modern Day Republican", anything that even acknowledges the Democrats as a viable political party is "Extremist Far Left Nonsense" to these deplorables.
How much do you think Linda Yaccarino is enjoying her job as CEO?
Forgot she even existed.
So did Elon ;-)
You mean the person hired to wear the mascot costume? What does she actually do there? It's still just Elon. Elon should've just worn a wig. Would've been the same end result and he could save Twitter even more money.
Donno, I ignore her salary.
I completely believe that they were failing.
Question is how bad will the PsyOps and interference get? Without them?
Depends on how relevant twitx still is come the elections...
It will still be relevant with the minority that holds the majority of power in the US due to gerrymandering, the electoral college, and all of the effort that Republicans have put into making it extremely difficult for people in cities to vote. I mean Fox News was only relevant to them in the last several elections.
The next time there's an election that the Republicans try to steal, X (formerly Twitter) will now work to back up their lies completely. That's what's really happening here.
Not QUITE how Twitter works, Democrats can pay for ads and run all the psyops they want with fake accounts too.
Question is whether any Chinese or Russian intelligence teams decide targeting messages at lefties is going to contribute towards their goals as a whole.
ah our dayli reminder that Elon Musk is a cunt and as always he delivers!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Elon Musk-owned social network formerly named Twitter has reportedly cut half of its election integrity team just weeks after saying it would expand the group.
Now operating under the name X, Musk's firm "is cutting around half of the global team devoted to limiting disinformation and election fraud on the platform, including the head of the group, according to three people familiar with the situation," The Information reported yesterday, adding:
The cuts hit all four Dublin-based members of the team, including Aaron Rodericks, its leader, who is based in Ireland, the people familiar with the matter said.
In response he said he received "a barrage of threatening, and abusive messages" from persons who wrongly believed the posts were an attempt by X to censor free speech and influence election outcomes.
But on August 29, X said it was "expanding our safety and elections teams to focus on combating manipulation, surfacing inauthentic accounts and closely monitoring the platform for emerging threats."
Using nearly identical language as last month's announcement, she said X is "expanding the safety and election teams all around the world to focus on combating things like manipulation, surfacing of inauthentic accounts and closely monitoring the platform for any emerging threats."
The original article contains 739 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
🤡
So Putin told you to do this? I mean, why else would you do something so blatantly stupid?
I have run out of surprised reactions to his bullshit.
They were being fair and balanced, not favoring a particular candidate or party. This of course is not what Musk intended, so they got the axe.
I'm about 75% certain this guy has no idea which words are coming out of his mouth.
@L4s Funny how musk fears the truth
Man I'd pay money for him to do the same thing to the totally democratic election commission of Pakistan.
But that would involve getting rid of a useless thing which I don't think Musk is physically capable of doing lol
This guy 👈 [sing-song]
If 4chan made Trump win in 2016, Twitter might make Trump win in 2024. Which is a scary thought. Just imagine the level of control one rich man can have over the information highway, Twitter, one of the biggest social media sites in the world, used still by many politicians, journalists and reporters on both sides. It's happening.